Child Psychology [CHAPTER NOTES] Part 4 - I got a 4.0 in the course

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School

Florida State University

Department

Psychology

Course

DEP 3103

Professor

All

Semester

Winter

Description

Chapter 4
 Development in infancy
• Infancy
→ The average North American newborn is
⇒ 20 inches long
⇒ 7 ½ lbs
→ Most newborns lose 5% to 7% of their body weight in the first several days of life
(mother’s milk doesn’t come in right at birth)
→ Newborns double their weight by 4 months and almost triple it in a year
• Enormous change in a short period of time
→ Infancy spans the first year
→ Start: immobile organism with a set of reflexes
→ End: coordinated movement across multiple senses
→ Involves both development of musculature and brain development
→ View changed over last century
⇒ Old view: passive, incompetent
⇒ New view: actively relate to world, competent – refined methods
 Newborn reflexes
• Reflex: inborn, automatic response to a particular form of stimulation
• newborn’s most obvious organized patterns of behavior
• can reveal the health of a baby’s nervous system
→ Early warning damage to cerebral cortex
• Some form the basis for later motor skills
→ Ex. – tonic neck reflex, palmer grasp, swimming and stepping
• Reflexes are adaptive → Survival value
⇒ Still useful; useful in evolutionary past
• Development of reflexes
→ Social reflexes?
⇒ Smiling: within first week purely reflex whenever they see human faces;
purposeful by few months old; elicits caregiving, to make you give them the
things that they need
⇒ Grasping: you think it’s them saying “I love you”
 Newborn states
• 5 states of arousal
→ Regular sleep (8-9 hours): deep, restful sleep; no movement
→ Irregular sleep (8-9 hours): REM, moving
→ Drowsiness (varies): transition between being awake and being asleep
→ Quiet alertness (2-3 hours): just sitting quietly and observing their environment, lots
of learning
→ Waking activity and crying (1-4 hours): doing activities and just being fussy
• Sleep patterns
→ Between birth and 2 years, sleep and wakefulness patterns change
⇒ Sleep needs decline from 18 to 12 hours a day by age 2
⇒ Sleep-wake patterns begin conforming to a circadian rhythm
→ Arousal patterns are affected by brain development and cultural practices
→ Patterns have implications for early cognitive progress; disturbed sleep patterns are
more likely/underlying cause is central nervous system issues and they’re more likely
to die from Sudden Death Syndrome
→ Sleep (16-18 hours/day) “back to sleep”
⇒ % REM sleep vs. nREM sleep
• Fetus = 80% • Newborn = 50%
• Adult = 20%
⇒ Autostimulation theory: Boismeyer checkerboard theory
• What if REM sleep compensates for the lack of visual stimulation infants
have? What if during the waking hours, we bombarded them with visual
stimulus?
→ Showed them the Boismeyer checkerboard; quiet alertness vs. not given
checkerboard; then tested sleep patterns; those who saw the
checkerboard, had less REM sleep
• REM sleep is not restful, it’s more likely that they will wake up during this
sleep; you can trigger your child to have lots of environmental stimulation and
then “trick” them into getting that stimulation when they’re awake so they
sleep deeper
 Crying
• First way that babies communicate
→ Stimulates strong feelings of arousal and discomfort in both men and women; elicits
caregiving
⇒ Adaptive value – nothing can get a parent to go to their child quicker than it
screaming
→ Young infants most often cry because of hunger
• Typically increase during the early weeks, peaks at about 6 weeks, and then declines
→ Due to normal readjustments of the central nervous system
• Soothing
→ Cultural differences
⇒ U.S. carrying study; African cultures where babies were carried all day spent less
time crying that in North America and other countries; assigned some kids to be
carried all day long and some not; those who were carried